


Melt

by provocative_envy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Light Angst, Soul Bond, Tattoos, Trope Subversion/Inversion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 15:16:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9663197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: platonic soul bond turning romantic,Draco frantically types into the search bar on his phone.





	

 

* * *

 

Draco is eleven years old when he meets Pansy Parkinson.

He isn’t sure, at first, that she’s the one. That she’s _his_. There are thousands and thousands of people in the world, after all, people who must have her same initials, people who could, theoretically, be responsible for the two tiny, curlicue letter P’s inked onto the inside of his right wrist. He’s been introduced to a few of them already. The Registry is still new enough that it doesn’t get it right every time. Not yet.

And yet.

Draco finds himself watching, inexplicably entranced, as Pansy Parkinson emerges from the backseat of a shiny red Range Rover.

She’s small, skinny like she’s just had a growth spurt, with a ski-slope nose and pin-straight black hair and posture so perfect that it might even impress his mother. Her skirt is grey, and her blouse is pink, and there’s a very calculated _softness_ to how she’s dressed, to how she’s walking, to how she’s smiling, sweet and slick, at the valet waiting to take her father’s car keys.

Draco doesn’t blink.

Draco _can’t_ blink.

A strange, mercurial weight is pressing down on his sternum, anchoring him to the plush ivory carpet in the hotel lobby, and it’s recognition and it’s anticipation and he can hear something… _stir_ , almost, deep, deep inside himself, a muffled thud, straining and slow, a newfound second heartbeat that’s weird, and alien, and _permanent_. He doesn’t know how he knows any of that. He doesn’t think he’s supposed to.

“Draco,” his mother says, idly smoothing out an invisible crease on the tailored sleeve of his jacket. “It’s time, darling. She’s here. Be _nice_.”

 

* * *

 

Up close, Pansy Parkinson’s eyes are a murky grey-blue, kind of like the ocean during a rainstorm, and they widen, ever so slightly, when Draco reaches for her hand.

 

* * *

 

Telepathy isn’t real.

They try, when they’re fourteen and get assigned to different homerooms and their school implements a fucking _archaic_ “No Cell Phones, No Exceptions” policy, and it’s like losing a limb and feeling the compulsive one-two twitch of the leftover nerves searching for an outlet, an electrical charge, a place to rest and cling and connect—and it’s horrible, and it’s lonely, and Draco listens to the morning announcements about lacrosse tryouts and soul bond seminars and student council elections with a sulky listlessness that he thinks, with a sour pang of frustration, that Pansy would _definitely_ make fun of him for.

So.

Telepathy isn’t real.

They can’t actually read each other’s minds.

 

* * *

 

There’s a blank space on Draco’s chest where his _other_ soulmate’s initials are supposed to be.

“Why do you think it happens?” he asks, flopping backwards onto Pansy’s bed. His hair’s still damp from his post-game shower. She’s going to whine about the wet spot on her pillow later. “The, uh, the _six percent_ thing, or whatever.”

Pansy shrugs. She’s drawing impossibly elaborate little flowers on her nails with a Wite-Out pen. “I think we’re lucky,” she muses, shaking out her hand as she blows on her thumb. She’s always impatient for the polish to dry. “Like—we get to _choose_ , you know? Who we fall in love with? That’s—I mean. That’s _good_. Romantic. Isn’t it?”

Draco considers the slowly spinning blades of her ceiling fan. He trusts his letters. Trusts the science, and the magic, and the judgment, preconceived and predetermined, that had given him _Pansy_. There’s a reason he wasn’t born with a second set of initials. He believes that. It’s rare, yeah, but it’s not _wrong_.

“I’d have chosen you,” Draco eventually says, and the words—they taste like he means them. “If you weren’t on my wrist already.”

Pansy ducks her chin, glancing over at him with a slyly wistful sort of fondness that he _feels_ , feels pulse and skitter and take up residence somewhere behind his ribs. He should be used to that, by now. He’s glad that he isn’t.

“Yeah,” she sighs. “Same.”

 

* * *

 

Some people like to cover their letters up.

There’s an entire industry devoted to it, tinkling charm bracelets and gleaming metal bands and avant-garde silk patches, a constantly evolving rotation of _privacy guards_ , traditional and conservative, ostensibly designed to prevent overzealous strangers from claiming they’ve seen their initials on the bony wrist of a supermodel, or the heavily muscled chest of a professional athlete, but—

That isn’t _really_ why people wear them.

 

* * *

 

When they’re eighteen, Pansy’s grandmother sends her a beautiful, lace-embossed leather wrist cuff.

Pansy doesn’t wear it.

 

* * *

 

They apply to the same ten colleges.

Draco is accepted into eight of them, Pansy into five, and when they eventually move out of their disgusting freshman dorms, their off-campus apartment has two bedrooms.

They don’t use the second one.

His mother decorates it, picks out a ton of blues and plaids and greens and nautical themed throw pillows, but the finished product looks absolutely nothing like Draco’s old room at his parents’ house, and he thinks that’s probably on purpose. Thinks that it’s probably a tacit, uncharacteristically gentle acknowledgment of…something.

It isn’t like that, though.

Not with Pansy.

It’s just _easier_ , to be together.

To fall asleep the way they already live the rest of their lives.

 

* * *

 

Neither of them are asexual, or aromantic, or— _uninterested_ , exactly.

But Draco can’t actually imagine ever finding another person who fits alongside him as effortlessly as Pansy does. Can’t actually imagine ever _wanting_ to. Because he’s pretty sure there’s supposed to be some kind of natural deficiency in their relationship—a blankness, an emptiness, a _void_ for the missing letters on his chest to have folded themselves into—but there isn’t. There never has been.

“I don’t think it’s like this for everyone,” Pansy confesses to him the night she turns twenty-one. She’s drunk, and her hair is falling out of its complicated nest of braids, sticking to her neck, her sweat-slick bare skin, and she has the side of her face pressed into Draco’s thigh, her knees tucked up and her shoes kicked off and her dress partially unzipped. “I think—I think we won some kind of _soulmate lottery_.”

He grins, running the pad of his thumb along the notches of her spine. “Yeah,” he agrees, solemnly. “We did.”

She hiccups, and then giggles, and then rolls onto her back. Her cheeks are flushed a warm, rosy pink. She’s happy. He can tell. “I’d just—god, I’d be—I’d be so _jealous_ ,” she murmurs, eyes fluttering shut.

His lips twitch. “Of what?”

“If I had to—” Pansy yawns, scrunching her nose up, and he reaches for her hand. Laces their fingers together. Lets his gaze smugly wander over the neat, boxy letters printed on the inside of her wrist. “If I had to _share_ you with someone, Draco, I’d _hate_ it. I’d hate _them._ Wouldn’t you?”

He frowns.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Pansy wakes up with a wicked hangover.

Draco’s head is a little clearer than he’d like it to be.

 

* * *

 

The real issue, he realizes almost immediately, is that he’s never been able to look at Pansy with any discernible degree of objectivity.

She’s his fucking _soulmate_. The only one he’s ever going to get. She’s important. He loves her differently. Separately. Loves her in the same way that _she_ loves _him_.

Because Pansy.

 _Pansy_ .

Pansy had wordlessly child-proofed their awful minimalist coffee table when Draco couldn’t stop hitting his knees on the razor-sharp edges. And she’d come home with a glossy white pastry box full of macadamia shortbread when Draco had been especially homesick during midterms last year. And she’d drawn an entire field of wildflowers on the plain white canvas of his cast when he’d broken his arm, scribbled her initials in vibrant pink marker over his pulse point, and she’d whispered, like it was a secret, like he didn’t already know, “See, now I’m _everywhere_ ,” and he’d been high on fucking painkillers and her cheeks had been tearstained, tacky with streaks of mascara, but he’d thought—he’d dreamed—

“Oh,” he says now, out loud. “Oh, _fuck_.”

The revelation isn’t much of one, actually.

 

* * *

 

It’s a problem.

It’s a flaw, fundamental and foundational and—fucked. It’s fucked. He’s fucked.

He starts avoiding her.

 

* * *

 

Pansy confronts him a few days into his self-imposed exile.

“Morning,” she greets him, archly. “When did you get home last night?”

She has on one of Draco’s old t-shirts, a large, faded green MALFOY stenciled across the back, and the ribbed cotton collar is stretched out, worn thin, exposing the wings of her clavicle and the delicate slope of her shoulder. It’s not an unusual picture. She’s been wearing his clothes to bed for—years. _Years._ The sight of it—the sight of _her—_ it shouldn’t punch the breath out of his lungs. It shouldn’t hit him so hard. It shouldn’t make those two tiny, curlicue letter P’s on the inside of his wrist flare hotly, brightly, _ferociously_. She’s acting normal. She’s fine.

Draco, though.

Draco _isn’t_.

“Uh,” he says, belatedly. “I—yeah, I got back a little late. Didn’t, uh, didn’t want to wake you up. So. Yeah.”

Pansy furrows her brow. “Right. Okay. Are you—” She cuts herself off, dragging her thumb over the pointy edge of the kitchen counter. There’s an awkwardness hovering between them—a tension—that’s never been there before. It hurts like a fucking third-degree burn. “Are you...okay?”

Draco clears his throat. “Yeah,” he lies, taking a too-quick gulp of coffee. It’s lukewarm. He hadn’t remembered to add milk. “I’m fine. Why?”

Pansy hesitates. “You’re just—you’ve been acting kind of weird.”

Draco hates how wary she sounds. How carefully she’s holding herself. He’s used to feeling like an asshole, but not around her. Never around her. “Yeah,” he says again, helplessly. “I’m—sorry about that. Just. Stress. You know?”

She clenches her jaw. Purses her lips. Wrenches open the refrigerator door. And he watches, guilt pooling in his stomach like gritty fucking seawater, as she scans the shelves, absently plucking a hard-boiled egg out of the bowl on top of the vegetable crisper. She pauses when she notices the unopened carton of milk.

“Stress,” she repeats. “Yeah. Okay.”

 

* * *

 

It’s not okay.

He needs to fix it.

He needs to fix _himself_.

 

* * *

 

 _platonic soul bond turning romantic,_ Draco frantically types into the search bar on his phone.

He cracks his knuckles while he waits for the page to load, looking furtively around the smoky interior of the café he’s holed up in. The Wi-Fi here is shit, honestly, but he hadn’t changed his auto-connect settings before sitting down, and if he changes them _now_ his 4G will stutter-stall until it turns back on and then his browser will freeze and he’ll have to redo the search and he isn’t entirely sure that he’s brave enough to even _think_ these words again let alone tap them out, one shaky touch-screen key at a time, painstaking and desperate and so, so, _so_ fucking scared—

The first result is a Yahoo Answers thread with over 3,700 responses.

The second is a Newsweek article about the Registry having to comply with a federal mandate regarding age of consent laws in states without Romeo and Juliet provisions.

Draco stares blankly at the five-point star drawn into the foam of his latte, throat going dry and tight—like it’s, like it’s _shrinking,_ or something.

He switches his phone off.

 

* * *

 

It isn’t like they’ve never kissed.

They try, once, when they’re seventeen and they’ve had too much to drink and it’s _New Year’s_ and there are wisps of silver tinsel in Pansy’s hair and Draco has the top three buttons of his shirt undone and there’s a loud, celebratory cheer echoing from downstairs, infiltrating the comfortably hazy cocoon of his bedroom, and it’s a countdown, it’s a finish line, it’s the satiny red finish of her lipstick smearing across the bow of her upper lip and the pearly white flash of her teeth as she smiles around a mouthful of champagne and he doesn’t _understand_ why they haven’t done this before, how they haven’t _wondered_.

So.

It isn’t like they’ve never kissed.

They can’t actually pretend that it didn’t happen.

 

* * *

 

He’s sitting in the dark when she gets home.

“We need to talk,” he says, and he can’t bring himself to be _embarrassed_ by the shivery little crack in his voice. His chest aches. His skin is raw. He doesn’t know where he ends and she begins and that isn’t even _new._ “Pansy. We need to talk.”

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t say anything for a while.

She’s next to him on the couch, knees drawn up under her chin, and there’s a brittle quality to the slant of her spine—like she’s fragile, like she’s dangerous, like she’s a wave about to crash and break and take an unexpected _bite_ out of the fucking sand.

“Did you—did you see it?” she finally asks, turning to face him. “Is that why you…why you’ve been so weird?”

He swallows. “What?”

“Did you see the tattoo,” she says, before clarifying, more quietly, “ _My_ tattoo.”

And her tone is flat and her gaze is hard and he feels her nerves, her uncertainty, the tangled split-end tendrils of her fear—he feels all of it, feels it as intimately as he would if it belonged to him, _originated_ from him, and he doesn’t—

“I chose you,” he blurts out, and just like it’s always been so easy to tell Pansy the truth, so, so easy, it’s easy to fumble for the buttons on his shirt, to yank down the collar, to peel off the medical-grade tape and the fuzzy white gauze and show her—proof. Evidence. The two tiny, curlicue letter P’s he’d had inked onto his chest, still fresh and tender and red around the edges. “I _choose_ you.”

She stares.

Her expression flickers with surprise, and disbelief, and _awe_ , maybe, as she reaches out, skims her fingers over slightly inflamed skin, traces the letters, lets the heat of her palm seep into his body, and Draco wants—Draco wants a lot of things, suddenly.

But then she sniffs, and she tosses her hair, and she shifts closer, and her smile—her smile is understated, close-mouthed, just the smallest upward tilt of her lips, but it’s _identical_ to the one she’d given him when he’d been eleven, when he’d been fourteen, when he’d been sixteen and nineteen and twenty-one and he’d felt all the moving parts of his future finally slot into place. It’s genuine. Private. Reserved for him.

 _Made_ for him.

“Yeah,” she breathes out, and he knows what she’s going to say before she says it. Of course he does. “Same.”

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> [come join me in hell](http://www.provocative-envy.tumblr.com)


End file.
